Tag: submission of the year

Today’s lesson: You should never judge a fighter by his name. Example A: Paddy “The Baddy” Pimblett. Believe it or not, Paddy Pimblett is not the name of some off-brand Irish cereal cartoon, nor is he a pre-adolescent street urchin with rickets and a pegleg whose only wish for Christmas this year is to get adopted by a rich old man. No, Paddy Pimblett is actually a 6-1 MMA fighter from Liverpool, England who scored a submission of the year nominee at Cage Warriors 68 last Saturday via a flying triangle armbar over Conrad Hayes. So, there’s that.

Honestly, calling Paddy’s sub a “flying triangle” doesn’t really do it justice. While defending a high single leg takedown against the cage midway through the first round, Pimblett more or less Spidermans up the cage while working a kimura/trapping Hayes’ arm. Then, while hanging in mid-air, Pimblett starts throwing some Silva vs. Lutter-esque elbows from the top before locking up a triangle. After Hayes tries to slam himself out of the sub in vain, Pimblett uses the opportunity to throw a few more vicious elbows before adding an armbar on top of it all to force the tap.

Just a masterful display of improvisation on Pimblett’s part, and a much-needed win for MMA fighters named Paddy in general. Not since Paddy O’Furniture knocked out Mark Coleman in a Denny’s parking lot after UFC 12 has such a victory been scored. But what do you think, Nation? Sub of the Year-worthy or not?

Here at CagePotato, we make mistakes. Often. Perhaps more often than not.

Case in point: Last year, we declared Wolfgang Janssen’s flying reverse triangle to be the greatest submission of 2012 at the 2012 Potato Awards. We comp’d a limosine and hotel room for Janssen so he could be present at the ceremony, we bestowed him with a Golden Potato, the highest known award in MMA. Hell, we even picked up the tab for the high class Vietnamese prostitute that Danga insisted Wolfgang “try out.” Weird guy, that Danga.

Long story short, it appears that we might have made a mistake in bestowing Janssen with the aforementioned award. While there’s no denying how incredible his submission was, the video above, which was recorded in June of 2012 but has only recently gone viral, features an arguably more impressive one. Who are we kidding? It’s one of the most technically improbable submissions we’ve ever seen — some bastard offspring of a Omoplata, Twister, Rear Naked Choke and Peruvian Necktie that simply needs to be seen to be believed.

After a back and forth battle, Coty Shannon is taken down by Brian Borden midway through the second round (around the 4:20 mark). Shannon quickly locks up an omoplata, but rather than use it to set up a traditional sweep, he just sort of grabs Borden around the neck with his forearms and starts cranking. Too busy trying to defend the omoplata, Borden is left hung out to dry and goes limp almost instantly.

We may be only a few months into 2013, but the list of potential Potato Award recipients is quickly filling up like it’s going out of style. We already have a strong frontrunner for “Flop of the Year” in Nick “Turbo Tax” Capes, and just last week, we introduced the greatest knockout of the year, “The Skywalker Crotchcracker” (a.k.a The Spinning Harold Howard, The McSleepytime Falcon Roundhouse, or The Over-the-Shoulder-Boulder-Holder).

And although the fight in which Olivier Fontaine was able to pull of this absolutely insane flying armbar actually went down in early February, the video of said armbar has only recently started making its way around the MMA blogosphere. We’ve thrown a full video of the fight above, but skip to the 1:28 mark to see just what we’re talking about.